Students’ work to be showcased at IU Cinema

"Amongst the Trees" is a film by IU student Tayla Blewitt. The Fall 2018 Student Films Showcase will start at 7 p.m. Dec. 11 at IU Cinema.
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As the semester winds down, students are finishing up big projects and preparing themselves for break. Some student filmmakers at the Media School and the School of Art, Architecture + Design get the chance to display their hard work to their peers and show how they see the world through a video camera.

The Fall 2018 Student Films Showcase will start at 7 p.m. Dec. 11 at IU Cinema. The event is free to attend, but ticketed. Jon Vickers, the director of IU Cinema, said he thinks showing student work is very important.

"Since opening, it has been key to our mission to showcase student work and provide unparalleled opportunities,” Vickers said in an email. “In addition to screening student films, we support the creation of new work through commissions, partner with student curators for film series and festivals, offer filmmaker master classes and have students help host our guests.”

The showcase contains 19 different films and is scheduled to run for 90 minutes. The event will display a variety of short films created by IU students, with themes including music, time, nature and social issues.

“Southern Indiana Pride,” a film created by Sean Massura, a junior in the Media School studying cinema and media production, is a documentary that focuses on a large pride festival in Spencer, Indiana. He said that his goal with the film was to learn more about the Kinsey Institute, the LGBT niche of this region and the surrounding beliefs of the communities.

“Above all else, my film is about lending people a voice,” Massura said in an email. “The documentary is non-denominational, non-secular and entirely impartial to people of all groups; perfectly equating the mentality of the LGBT community and hopefully, one day, all people.”

Another filmmaker whose project will be shown is Amanda Hoover, a senior majoring in both contemporary dance and cinema and media production. Her film "Astray" is about a dancer becomes bored with his mundane routine that never changes and wishes for change.

Hoover submitted the film to IU Cinema under the title "Dance," but later changed it.

“I’ve been dancing my entire life, and with film, I’ve always been kind of hard on myself because I don’t feel like I know all the things a filmmaker should know,” Hoover said. “Then my professor asked me if I wanted my film to be screened at the student showcase, and I thought that was cool. It made me realize that I’m not as amateur as I think I am.”

The Student Films Showcase occurs every semester and is a chance for student filmmakers to show off and be proud of their work. There are many approaches to film that are represented in this collection and the showcase is a way of combining these different styles into one event that students can enjoy.

“I am delighted to put together this program every semester, and there is some amazing work represented this time,” said senior lecturer in the Media School Susanne Schwibs in an email. “It all combines into a wonderful showcase of the creativity that happens in our classrooms.”

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